Interior Designer Billy Cotton Demonstrates Vision in New Monograph
Billy Cotton discusses the inspiration behind his new book, highlighting why he is the go-to interior designer for today's biggest creatives.
Photography by Stephen Kent Johnson
To any keen observer, flipping through the pages of Billy Cotton’s first monograph is like visiting an alternate reality in the design multiverse. While everything appears completely familiar—comfortable American sitting rooms, trendy kitchens, sultry boudoirs—something feels different. Subversive, even. Colors that should clash, don’t. Material combinations that might sound harsh on paper achieve wonders, and periods mix together in ways others wouldn’t dare. From one house or apartment to the next, each believably seems to be by a different creator. “I don’t have a style, really,” says Cotton. “There’s no look I’m trying to sell.”
But Cotton isn’t an interdimensional traveler. Instead, he’s become the go-to decorator for an ultra-smart set of creatives who look for something different, even a bit twisted—in the most subtle sense of the word. The artists and insiders on his clientele list speak volumes, especially his longtime collaborator, photographer Cindy Sherman. Her East Hampton home opens his eponymous monograph—which was published by Rizzoli in March 2022—and is filled with both traditional elements like an antique painted Austrian cabinet and more unusual, boho-chic touches like armchairs covered in multicolored Pakistani ralli quilts. In some ways, it’s easy to see the parallels between Cotton’s imaginative yet grounded choices and the photographic works of Sherman. Like her delightfully eerie self-portraits, Cotton’s work is just as gleefully wicked.
Cotton describes the book as a “manifestation of a journey.” In early 2020, he shut down his interiors business for a brief stint running Ralph Lauren Home, only to then restart his firm from scratch a year later. Despite the professional detour, he was able to hire a largely brand-new team and now has more than 20 projects on his plate. Despite the winding road to becoming the respected designer he is today, creating the book gave him “such incredible perspective on how special the job—that I didn’t train to do but ended up learning to do—is.”
After learning about Cotton’s background and self-taught start in the business, it’s easy to see how he developed his eye. He spent his childhood in the erudite town of Brookline, Massachusetts but moved to Burlington, Vermont, at the age of 13. Cotton’s father was a forensic psychiatrist for a prison, and his mother a psychologist who worked with children. “Living in Vermont spurred a whole thing about fantasy,” he says. “I didn’t have access to a lot.” Instead of visiting museums, Cotton devoured media like shelter magazines. “I was obsessed with how people were living,” he says. Before turning to design professionally, he had stints studying in Paris, where he worked in flea markets, and studying Russian history while doing odd jobs in the art world, before finally switching gears to study art history at Pratt Institute. Then, at 21, Cotton became enamored with what his friends were doing at Pratt’s famed industrial design program and made the switch to design. “At first, I didn’t know where I wanted to belong,” he says. “I just wanted to be respected as an industrial designer.”
"I'm intense...I'm not a house flipper."
With legends like Charles and Ray Eames as his heroes, Cotton set out to start his own design and homewares brand, selling objects like ceramics and plateware, which were carried at Bergdorf Goodman and Harrod’s, and freelancing for Domino, creating things like pillows, slipcovers, and even fake paintings for photo shoots. (He even made a fashion showroom for Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. at one point at the magazine’s behest.) Today, he still creates his own furniture and lighting collections. Unlike his contemporaries, his portfolio of objects—from simple bowls to delicate-look, Regency-inspired furniture—feature proudly in his book. “I’ll always try to make things,” he admits.
It was a little more than a decade ago when Cotton’s interior design practice began to take off. After doing small decorating jobs for friends, he was asked to redecorate a small cabin for singer-songwriter Jenni Muldaur in East Hampton. Her friend Cindy Sherman loved the job he did for her, which started his love of creating interiors, and he snared Sherman as a client. At the time, while his tabletop business was robust, decoration proved “more interesting and layered” than design of his more utilitarian objects.
While Cotton claims he doesn’t have a look, there are common threads. “There’s a general warmth,” he says. That idea is partly reflected in his penchant for wall-to-wall carpets and floor-to-ceiling ripplefold curtains that turn an ordinary room into a dramatic fantasy. “I love to feel enveloped in rooms,” he says. “Wall-to-wall carpets do that. It’s about continuity.”
These techniques also create personality, an idea he took to the extreme for a bedroom and adjoining bath for the famed Kips Bay Show House in 2017. He imagined the space as a one-room apartment for a glamorous woman who “has seen tragedy in her life” and was downsized to her new, smaller home that was supposedly designed by a close gay confidant.
The bedroom is surrounded with a tan chinoiserie wallpaper the same color as the ceiling and a sexy, wall-to-wall leopard print carpet. But in typical fashion, one secondary element adds unexpected drama: the baseboards, fireplace, and radiator covers were all custom made from stark sheets of polished stainless steel. What could have looked dowdy and played-out instead shines with a kind of kitschy modernity. But Cotton doesn’t like to make grandiose statements. Instead, he describes his thumbprint as “elegant, but not overwrought.”
“At first, I didn’t know where I wanted to belong...I just wanted to be respected."
If the unexpected nature of Cotton’s spaces has a drawback, it would be when his inner industrial designer comes through, causing him to obsess over every detail. “I’m intense,” he says bluntly. “I’m not a house flipper.” As an example, he recants the tale of a brass door handle he recently had custom made for an Upper East Side apartment, on which he included a little indentation for the pinky finger to rest on. “I care too much about detail,” he says. But Cotton hates the idea of setting any hard-and-fast rules about design. His book was originally meant to be filled with quotes and other elements that gave things context and described why he made certain choices. But in the end, he decided to let the reader make their own inferences. “I have a lot of opinions,” he says, “but the concept of dictating what good taste is—I’m not into that. After all, I’m from Burlington and went to public school.”
